George Pitcher is an Anglican priest who serves his ministry at St Bride's, Fleet Street, in London – the "journalists' church".

Sad atheists try to vote God out of power

Hilariously, a poll to promote the Alpha course, the evangelistic tool marketed out of the happy-clappy Holy Trinity Brompton, has backfired by revealing that 98 per cent of respondents claim that God does not exist.

The Sun today actually reports the figure as 96 per cent, with a massive 88,000 respondents. That figure has now risen on the Alpha website to 154,515 votes.

And it's these massive figures that should make us suspicious. The Sun talks cryptically of a "web poll sting" and it looks very much to me like secular-humanist activists have been voting early and often here, rather in the way that political parties get their supporters hitting their keyboards to manipulate opinion polls.

I'm not being a sour-grapes revisionist. It's just that recent surveys have put the Christian population at around 76 per cent of the UK. Now, the overwhelming majority of those may be the sort of Christians that don't believe in God, but I rather doubt it.

So that leaves the prospect of sad secularist and atheist campaigners spending hours clicking No on the Does God Exist? website. Bless. It's quite a funny stunt, but like the Humanist Society's silly little poster campaign on the side of bendy buses last year you do just wonder two things: Why do they bother and what are they so worried about?

Their answers to these questions could lead them, in mysterious ways, to the Alpha course.